To win favor among the booboisie, Rubio creates a straw man and knocks it down

Tuesday

May 13, 2014 at 11:11 AMMay 13, 2014 at 1:42 PM

Any politician with a gift for demagoguery is familiar with a practice known as “attacking a straw man.”

Here’s how it works:

In a debate on a matter of political controversy, you should ascribe to your opponent a position he or she doesn’t actually take, and then refute it. You have thereby created a straw man and knocked it over so as to ingratiate yourself with people whose critical thinking skills are not especially well-advanced.

Let’s say, for example, that your opponent is a criminal defense attorney. He clearly believes, as all Americans should, that criminal defendants have a right to legal representation in a court of law. But you create a straw man by suggesting that your opponent actually sympathizes with the child molesters and murderers he’s had occasion to represent in court.

(This example, by the way, is not merely hypothetical. It’s happening right now in an election contest in North Carolina. But that’s a story for another day.)

Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, employed the straw man strategy the other day in several interviews in which he declared that he doesn’t believe that human activity is a principal cause of global warming.

Here’s what he said on ABC:

“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying…”

And here’s what he said on CNN:

“I think that it’s an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or a majority of them are attributable to human activity.”

Taken together, those remarks suggest that scientists believe all or most unusual weather incidents are attributable to man-made global warming. But that’s not what scientists are saying.

As Jeffrey Kluger ARGUES in his rebuttal to Rubio, scientists actually “stress again and again that weather isn’t climate, that today’s heat wave in Arizona or flood in Colorado is nothing more than bad news for the people who live there, but that over time—say, over ‘a few decades of research’—trends emerge, patterns reveal themselves, and scientific theory becomes inescapable if still incomplete fact.”

Another interesting aspect of Rubio’s rhetoric is that he’s not actually denying the reality of global warming or climate change. Notice, for example, that he refers to “these dramatic changes to our climate.”

Rubio is only disputing the “man-made” angle of global warming, and he’s doing it by way of dissing the scientific community. The overall impression among the anti-science elements of the GOP right wing is that Rubio is one of their own. They won’t notice that he’s left himself some wiggle room if the climate situation gets dramatically worse during his political career.

Any politician with a gift for demagoguery is familiar with a practice known as “attacking a straw man.”

Here’s how it works:

In a debate on a matter of political controversy, you should ascribe to your opponent a position he or she doesn’t actually take, and then refute it. You have thereby created a straw man and knocked it over so as to ingratiate yourself with people whose critical thinking skills are not especially well-advanced.

Let’s say, for example, that your opponent is a criminal defense attorney. He clearly believes, as all Americans should, that criminal defendants have a right to legal representation in a court of law. But you create a straw man by suggesting that your opponent actually sympathizes with the child molesters and murderers he’s had occasion to represent in court.

(This example, by the way, is not merely hypothetical. It’s happening right now in an election contest in North Carolina. But that’s a story for another day.)

Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, employed the straw man strategy the other day in several interviews in which he declared that he doesn’t believe that human activity is a principal cause of global warming.

Here’s what he said on ABC:

“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying…”

And here’s what he said on CNN:

“I think that it’s an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or a majority of them are attributable to human activity.”

Taken together, those remarks suggest that scientists believe all or most unusual weather incidents are attributable to man-made global warming. But that’s not what scientists are saying.

As Jeffrey Kluger ARGUES in his rebuttal to Rubio, scientists actually “stress again and again that weather isn’t climate, that today’s heat wave in Arizona or flood in Colorado is nothing more than bad news for the people who live there, but that over time—say, over ‘a few decades of research’—trends emerge, patterns reveal themselves, and scientific theory becomes inescapable if still incomplete fact.”

Another interesting aspect of Rubio’s rhetoric is that he’s not actually denying the reality of global warming or climate change. Notice, for example, that he refers to “these dramatic changes to our climate.”

Rubio is only disputing the “man-made” angle of global warming, and he’s doing it by way of dissing the scientific community. The overall impression among the anti-science elements of the GOP right wing is that Rubio is one of their own. They won’t notice that he’s left himself some wiggle room if the climate situation gets dramatically worse during his political career.